Chapter 1: Introduction

Classical approaches have been used for solving biological systems since the Newton time. Most of the earlier effort has reduced a system to the simplest levels for the study. Such an effort is referred to as the reductionist [Mazzochhi, 2008]. Having recognised that a biological system is one of the most complicated systems on the earth, whether a biological system can be easily simplified for a meaningful research has been debated for a few decades [Mazzochhi, 2008]. Moreover, decomposing a biological system, such as a single organism or a single cell, to unrelated subparts to reduce the component number for the study has been greatly challenged nowadays [Glaeser, 1994; Wood, et al., 2004; Schenkel and Leggewie, 2015; Nussinov, 2015]. The challenges not only result from the aspects before an analysis such as experiment condition, data creation and storage, but also the methods used in analysis including the computational approaches, the computing facility as well as the interpretation and explanation after an analysis…